Fiction Interview

Tête-à-Tête with Mark Sarvas

Tête-à-Tête with Mark Sarvas

Once best known as the voice behind the popular literary blog The Elegant Variation that championed favorite writers and called out subpar writing and reviewing, Mark Sarvas is now an internationally lauded novelist in his own right.

Memento Park, his second novel is loosely based on his family’s history and maintains his signature viewpoint and undertone of humor while delivering a new take on what it means to be the child of a Holocaust survivor. It’s a riveting mystery about art reparation, family secrets, and how challenging it can be to know who we are. Memento Park is now available in paperback.

Tête-à-Tête with Tom Piazza (Fiction Interview No. 1)

Tête-à-Tête with Tom Piazza (Fiction Interview No. 1)

Tom Piazza’s new novel, A Free State, chronicles two runaways—one black, one white, each masquerading to claim his own life.

"...we enacted our imagined scenes of plantation life, our comic dialogues, our walk-arounds and our solo routines, our 'Boatman Dance' and 'Clare de Kitchen,' assuming a set of alternate identities behind the burnt cork, and we found a freedom there, behind the dark mask. The bitter irony of it all was as yet invisible to us. We were innocents, and yet we were complicit in a monstrous evil, in ways we could not see."    A Free State